Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/148



Goddard returned from Pancake that night, bringing letters for Taylor.

Sitting on the deacon's bench in the men's shanty John opened them. One was from his father. The address was typewritten, but within was a scant page of Luke's scrawl. It had been years since the old man had touched pen to paper for his son and that fact was thrilling!

"You are crazy to talk of that much pine. It can't be done. Don't believe everything they tell you up there just because you're a gullible cub. I'm sending Rowe to Pancake Monday night just to see how big a fool you are. Your mother is well. Yours, etc. L. Taylor."

John breathed deeply and smiled and scratched his head and re-read the crabbed sentences. Beneath their crustiness was genuine interest, a willingness, after Luke's manner, to take him seriously at last, an indication that the favors he had asked two months before and which had drawn only a cruel trick now were his.

Yesterday he would have tried to calculate the profit that might accrue to him from Luke Taylor's aid; tonight he saw only in that note a promise that the burden on Helen Foraker's shoulders would be lightened. She had helped him, she had shaped him—she had taught him; and now, perhaps, he could repay some of that obligation.

He could not know what waited just over the horizon of time!

The other letter was in a smudged, scrawled envelope,